1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image storage managing apparatus and image storage managing method for properly retrieving and displaying stored image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
For shops and sales companies which sell merchandise, sales management of merchandise and customer management are important managerial work.
Recently, POS (Point Of Sales) management has been introduced for sales management. With the use of this POS management, as a bar code affixed to a merchandise is read out, data on which merchandise has been sold is registered so that it is possible to discriminate how well individual merchandise has been sold and this information can be an index for placing an order for merchandise or sending back some merchandise. Accumulating such information provides a way to easily discriminating which merchandise is sold in which season, on which day of the week and in which time zone. It is apparent that sales management has been computerized significantly.
Customer management, however, is often a paper-basis process involving customer cards or the like. Further, the contents of the management information contain only imageless, character information. In some cases, a silver photograph or Polaroid photograph may merely be stuck on each customer card.
Attempts have also been made towards the computerization of the customer management. In this computerized system, ID cards of a credit-card size, such as service cards and membership cards, affixed with bar codes or magnetic tapes are issued to individual customers, and various types of information are data-based for the individual customers. In this case, however, accumulated information also consists only of character information.
Although the computerization of both the merchandise sales management and customer management is progressing gradually, those managements are independent of each other and are not linked to each other. For instance, for convenience stores, it is not so important who bought what, i.e., it is not considered so important what merchandise has been sold to which people.
However, there are some fields in which it is very important what merchandise has been sold to what people. In the apparel field, for example, if the preferences and purchase history is known, this known bought what merchandises or clothes is known, this information becomes very effective in planning and selling clothes. This system requires image data as well as character data.